Thursday, September 1, 2005
Patrick made breakfast for me and his mom: biscuits, bacon, scrambled eggs. Met with Cindy: performance review, which went well. Helped James figure out how to create a keyboard shortcut to attach files in new messages. I found the answer based on what kclemson posted in "Outlook 2003 tip o' the day" on 2003.0925.1449. Helped Chris update his Treo 650 ROM version from 1.03 to 1.12—the entire process took about an hour. (Thanks, Palm!) Also reinstalled mouse and keyboard drivers for his Oyster setup at home. Chris handed back the shared laptop now that his laptop is working again. I did maintenance updates on the shared laptop: firewall wasn't connecting to the central server so I reinstalled it; SpywareBlaster updates; ran a Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta scan, Acrobat 6.0.4 update. Built screen snapshot documentation for configuring Norton Anti-Virus 2005 for use with UCSF VPN. (Essentially, you need to disable its firewall feature called Internet Worm Protection.) Started building pages on the ITS website since John K gave me access yesterday. A small problem with permissions at the start which John fixed quickly, but no problems afterwards. They use JSP, which looks a lot like PHP to me. I found no real problems coding for it, but I'm not doing anything terribly complicated. There's one page where I have a simple function and couldn't figure out everything I needed, but I know John has a similar function somewhere else, so I'll just let him fill that part in. I was able to find out the JSP equivalent of REMOTE_ADDR on my own, though. Lunch: a salad. Snacks during the day: 3 bananas. Dinner at home with Patrick and Mom Ryan: leftovers from Lakeside Cafe, leftover biscuits from this morning. Tried setting up the mail server on the Mac Mini using Postfix Enabler which I bought a day or two ago, ran into some trouble, got help essentially immediately from Bernard Teo and it's working now. Mom Ryan went to school with Patrick today. She stayed nearby while he was in class and read or did some walking for exercise. She's reading from a novel called The Alchemist which Patrick recommended. While they were out, two people noticed she was reading it and said, "hey, that's a good book!" I haven't read it yet. Figured out a really easy way to convert DOS line endings to UNIX line endings in vim 5 or later. It goes like this... :set fileformat=unix (Enter) :w (Enter). Thanks for the answer, Sven Guckes! (However, I wasn't able to figure out how to make that permanent for all files. When I added 'set fileformat=unix' or 'set fileformat=unix' or both to my .vimrc, it didn't have the desired effect—existing files still opened with DOS line endings, even after rewriting the file out—why?) Patrick and his mom found out more news about the whereabouts of their family. They're going to figure out a summary of sorts and we'll post it here or on another frankfarm.org page soon. Today they visited Patrick's boss Karen at the LAC—Learning Assistance Center—and Mom Ryan told the story of how she narrowly escaped Hurricane Katrina and how she doesn't know where all of her family members are, and they were all in tears by the time she was done.